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9UIn Samuel Guttenplan (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 2017.Psychoanalytic theory describes a range of motives, mental states, and processes of which persons are ordinarily unaware, and which they can acknowledge, avow, and alter only with difficulty. Freud's collective term for these, and for the functional division of the mind to which he assigned them, was the unconscious. (For references and further discussion of italicized terms seeLaplanche and Pointalais, 1973). The term has also been used to describe other mental states, such as hypothesized beli…Read more
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56Mental States, Natural Kinds and Psychophysical LawsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 52 (1): 195-236. 1978.
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127Mental States, Natural Kinds and Psychophysical LawsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 52 (1): 195-236. 1978.
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4Philosophical Essays on Freud (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1982.Philosophers are increasingly coming to recognize the importance of Freudian theory for the understanding of the mind. The picture Freud presents of the mind's growth and organization holds implications not just for such perennial questions as the relation of mind and body, the nature of memory and personal identity, the interplay of cognitive and affective processes in reasoning and acting, but also for the very way in which these questions are conceived and an interpretation of the mind is sou…Read more
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Kantian neuroscience and radical interpreation : ways of meaning in the Bayesian BrianIn Gustavo Ortiz-Millán & Juan Antonio Cruz Parcero (eds.), Mind, Language and Morality: Essays in Honor of Mark Platts, Routledge. 2018.
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Reply: Irrationality, interpretation and divisionIn Cynthia Macdonald & Graham Macdonald (eds.), Philosophy of Psychology: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Blackwell. pp. 1--461. 1995.
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646IX*—Wittgenstein and PhysicalismProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 75 (1): 121-146. 1975.James Hopkins; IX*—Wittgenstein and Physicalism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 75, Issue 1, 1 June 1975, Pages 121–146, https://doi.org/10.109.
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1035Epistemology and Depth PsychologyIn C. Wright & P. Clark (eds.), Mind, Psychoanalysis, and Science, Blackwell. 1988.Psychoanalysis provides the best explanation of a range of empirical phenomena; epistemic criics do not take this fully into account.
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807Wittgenstein and the life of signsIn Max Kölbel & Bernhard Weiss (eds.), Wittgenstein's Lasting Significance, Routledge. 2004.Both Wittgenstein's account of following a rule and his private language argument turn on the notion of interpretation.
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260Patterns of Interpretation: Speech, Action, and DreamIn L. Marcus (ed.), Cultural Documents: The Interpretation of Dream, Manchester University Press. 1999.Freud's account of dreams can be understood via interpretive patterns that span language and action, enabling an extension of common sense psychology that is potentially cogent, cumulative, and radical.
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461Emotion, Evolution and ConflictIn Man Chung (ed.), Psychoanalytic Knowledge, . 2003.The psychoanalytic notions of identification and projection fit with Darwinian theory in explaining human group conflict and relating it to emotional conflict in individuals.
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1542Psychoanalysis, Philosophical IssuesIn SAGE Reference project Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, Sage Publications. 2014.This paper briefly addresses questions of confirmation and disconfirmation in psychoanalysis. It argues that psychoanalysis enjoys Bayesian support as an interpretive extension of commonsense psychology that provides the best explanation of a large range of empirical data. Suggestion provides no such explanation, and recent work in attachment, developmental psychology, and neuroscience accord with this view.
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385The Problem of Consciousness and the Innerness of the MindIn Mary Margaret McCabe & Mark Textor (eds.), Perspectives on Perception, De Gruyter. 2007.The problem of consciousness is taken to concern items which are internal to the mind, and phenomenal, subjective, and private. Understanding the notion of innerness in this enables us to understand the rest in physical terms.
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708Wittgenstein, Interpretation, and the Foundations of PsychoanalysisNew Formations. 1995.In his work on following a rule Wittgenstein discerned principles of interpretation that apply to commonsense psychology and psychoanalysis. We can use these to assess the cogency of psychoanalytic reasoning.
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533Free Energy and Virtual Reality in Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: A Complexity Theory of Dreaming and Mental DisorderFrontiers in Psychology 7. 2016.This paper compares the free energy neuroscience now advocated by Karl Friston and his colleagues with that hypothesised by Freud, arguing that Freud's notions of conflict and trauma can be understood in terms of computational complexity. It relates Hobson and Friston's work on dreaming and the reduction of complexity to contemporary accounts of dreaming and the consolidation of memory, and advances the hypothesis that mental disorder can be understood in terms of computational complexity and t…Read more
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This is a longer version of the paper published as 'Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Radical Interpretation. In everyday life we understand one another's utterances and actions, and hence interpret one another's linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour, with remarkable certainty, precision, and accuracy; and understanding of this kind seems basic to much else. Our interactions with others are mediated by interpretation of their actions, including speech; and much of what we regard ourselves as knowing…Read more
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690Freud and the Science of MindIn G. Howie (ed.), The Edinburgh Encylopaedia of Continental Philosophy, Edinburgh University Press. 1999.Freudian theory as an extension of commonsense psychology that is potentially cogent, cumulative, and radical.
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1540Psychoanalysis Representation and Neuroscience: the Freudian unconscious and the Bayesian brainIn A. Fotopoulu, D. Pfaff & M. Conway (eds.), From the Couch to the Lab: Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology in Dialoge, Oxford University Press. 2012.This paper argues that recent work in the 'free energy' program in neuroscience enables us better to understand both consciousness and the Freudian unconscious, including the role of the superego and the id. This work also accords with research in developmental psychology (particularly attachment theory) and with evolutionary considerations bearing on emotional conflict. This argument is carried forward in various ways in the work that follows, including 'Understanding and Healing', 'The Signi…Read more
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773The Significance of Consilience: Psychoanalysis, Attachment, Neuroscience, and EvolutionIn S. Boag L. Brakel & V. Talvete (eds.), Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Mind:Unconscious mentality in the 21st century, Karnac. 2017.This paper considers clinical psychoanalysis together with developmental psychology (particularly attachment theory), evolution, and neuroscience in the context a Bayesian account of confirmation and disconfrimation. In it I argue that these converging sources of support indicate that the combination of relatively low predictive power and broad explanatory scope that characterise the theories of both Freud and Darwin suggest that Freud's theory, like Darwin's, may strike deeply into natural ph…Read more
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532Psychoanalytic and Scientific ReasoningBritish Journal of Psychotherapy 13 (1). 1996.Psychoanalytic reasoning is an instance of inference to the best explanation and provides an extension of commonsense psychology that is potentially cogent, cumulative, and radical.
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2071Conscience and Conflict: Darwin, Freud, and the Origins of Human AggressionIn Dylan Evans & Pierre Cruse (eds.), Emotion, Evolution, and Rationality, Oxford University Press. 2004.Darwin's and Freud's theories cohere in explaining human group conflict.
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333Introduction: Philosophical Essays on FreudIn R. Wollheim & J. Hopkins (eds.), Philosophical Essays on Freud, Cambridge University Press. 1982.Psychoanalytic theory can be regarded as a cogent extension of commonsense psychology by interpretive means internal to it.
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1148Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Radical InterpretationIn F. Hahn (ed.), The Library of Living Philosophers: Donald Davidson, Open Court. 1999.Davidson's account of interpretation is closely related to that offered by Wittgenstein in his remarks on following a rule.
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